How to Safely Return to Live Meetings and Events in a Post-Pandemic World

The global pandemic started over a year ago. Due to safety concerns, the world stopped. Work, travel, entertainment, and events came to a screeching halt indefinitely. Fortunately, the world has worked diligently to stop the spread of the pandemic so that everyone can return to some semblance of a normal life.

Last month, Informa Markets MAGIC Pop-Up event in Orlando, Florida, using Stova’s best-in-class technology, took a large, successful leap in the right direction. This event was one of the first trade show organizers to produce a live trade event in North America since the pandemic lockdowns.

Image Source: Informa Markets

Stova’s innovative onsite technologies ensured a seamless, contact-less registration that valued both customer experience and safety. With the success of this event, here are the keys to successfully hosting events during COVID-19:

Meticulous Planning

“Every decision we make is driven by our community,” said Nancy Walsh, President, North America at Informa Markets.

Now more than ever, when planning past Covid-19, everyone involved needs to focus on the safety, comfortability, and security of the community that will be attending. Therefore, meticulous planning is essential.

For this event, creators, including Stova representatives, started discussing their event ideas during Covid. The team discussed these ideas as the pandemic progressed, always keeping their attendants’ safety in mind.

Everyone included in this planning process knew that eventually, they would make a safe return to the trade show floor. While the planning and ideas started flowing before they knew exactly when that would happen, they knew the world would not shut down forever.

Image Source: Informa Markets

Thus, Informa Markets, MAGIC Pop-Up Orlando presented an optimistic roadmap for commercial recovery as industries began rebounding. Stova shared Informa’s optimism and helped bolster their needs with help and suggestions from their vast library of technological security advancements.

Eventually, the team devised the safest plan for event planning post Covid-19.

Recommended Resource: The best event professionals predict that the future of events is not exclusively virtual or in-person but hybrid. Learn the best ways experts ensure you can turn your in-person events into engaging virtual or hybrid experiences. Read our blog post.

Safe Onsite Solutions

Leveraging Stova’s revolutionary event technology tools and services, Informa Markets created safe and efficient touchpoints for attendees and exhibitors by using safe onsite solutions.

Here are the specifics of what Stova did to ensure the safety and security of every attendant at the trade show:

Check-in & Badging

When deciding how to host events during Covid-19, the safety measures need to start before attendants even enter your event. Fortunately, Stova can help equip fully integrated, contactless, easy-to-use check-in kiosks and badging solutions.

The badge for an event has always been special. In addition to getting attendants into an event, badges are also a way for everyone to remember the event.

Now, badges are more important than ever because they are the key to unlocking successful event planning post Covid-19. Stova provides an array of options so you can select the best badges for your event. To start, you have the option of plastic or paper card stock badges that you can scan via NFC, QR, BLE, or UHF technology.

Plus, these badges bearing your custom branding also:

• Deliver live updates on attendee count and attendance.
• Integrate with registration for a safe, seamless, and contactless check-in.
• They are customizable in color and symbols, allowing you to know where a person belongs without getting too close.

Session Tracking & Access Control

Stova offers state-of-the-art session tracking and access control throughout the event, using the attendant’s badges. This technology provides access to real-time data, including attendee access to specified areas or sessions.

Plus, you can track the movement of your attendants throughout the venue. That way, you can easily enforce capacity limits and employ contact tracing during your event. Plus, since every attendant has a badge, you can tell who is where and how long they stayed, providing you with valuable metrics for your industry and your next event.

Professional and Managed Services

Navigating the new world of getting event ideas during covid to come to fruition is tricky for everyone. That is why you need professional and managed services. We are all together in figuring out the best moves for providing a safe and secure space for events.

Fortunately, Stova’s success in partnering with Informa Markets has provided a solid platform from which they can help make your event safe, secure, and exciting.

Stova’s Professional Onsite Support Specialists spent the better part of last year devising a plan for when events were possible again, and that plan worked marvelously. Therefore, the company is confident they can help you:

• Ease the learning curve by offering experience with hybrid events.
• Offering training to help your company understand the tools and tech you will need to run your event.
• Provide consistent help throughout the event.
• Continuing to develop new tools to service the industry as the need for safe in-person events grows.

Lead Retrieval

Events have always been a great place to gather leads, as you have industry-specific attendees who may be looking for services you provide. However, meeting these people and showing them what you can do is only good if you can collect their information to follow up with them later.

To facilitate touch-free lead retrieval, Stova provides an easy-to-use, compact scanning device which reads barcodes auto-generated through the registration module. This barcode scan quickly collects information such as information attendee and booth guest information. This information gets stored onto a Mobile Lead Retrieval app  that works on your iOS or Android mobile device, or you may rent a device from Stova.

After the information is collected, you can send that data directly to your CRM or marketing sales automation setup.

Future of Events Post Covid

While the best practices for events after covid continue to evolve, it is clear that the future of events post Covid will likely change event hosting forever. However, as you can see from the advancements, Stova has already helped revive the in-person event industry so these changes can be positive.

Recommended Resource: Event planners must be able to seamlessly pivot from exclusively online events to hybrid and, ultimately, in-person events once restrictions lift and it’s safe to do so. Read our latest blog post and learn why it’s essential to have a fully integrated event management platform, that can handle events of all types to help your organization move forward.

This pandemic has caused the world to implement and innovate technological advancements quickly. A year ago, many of these solutions were merely ideas, and now, they are a necessity. So, while no one likes the trial-by-fire option, it has jumpstarted the innovation of hybrid event planning into overdrive, compelling humanity to explore the true capabilities of our technology. These newfound capabilities are going to lead us to bigger and brighter innovations faster than we ever imagined.